The One With A Bit Of Creative Writing

The first short story I submitted for my creative writing class was set in Toronto and featured mainly Canadian characters. However, not being Canadian, a large part of the critiques I received about the story focused on how British my characters sounded. This is despite the fact I included multiple 'ehs.' Anyway, whilst it's certainly not my favourite thing I've written and it was in no way going to make it into my portfolio, it is about Canada so, I figured, I'd share it. But please please note that creative writing is not my strongest genre and that this is copyrighted so if you steal it, I will hunt you down, I will find you, and I will kill you (with a lawsuit and lots of passive aggressive letters). 

FAO church people who read this blog: don't read this.

One Cold Bed

By Hannah Barr

It’s not even that cold, George said silently to himself, knowing the betrayal of chattering teeth should he try and speak out loud. He eyeballed a group on students.

 “A loonie?” he asked, gingerly holding out his cupped hand.

They averted their gaze. They can afford to be decked out in their blue and yellow Ryerson tribal markings but they can’t spare one dollar? It’s the same in every university city across the world, where students mope over their faux poverty whilst their ears are plugged with hundred-dollar headphones, ignoring the homeless on their walks to class by staring at their cell phones. How many spare dollars walked past George each day on his ventilation grill on Yonge Street? Enough to get me coffee, that’s for sure.

“Watch out. The Bible-Bashers are about.”

“Christ.”

“Oh, you’ve become one of them now, eh?”

“Fuck you.”

“Language! You need them do-gooders it seems with that dirty tongue. Dirty tongue of a dirty bum.”

Don was as close a friend as you could get in George’s nomadic lifestyle. They fought over the same ventilation grill they were trying to sleep on this Fall, with George throwing the first punch and Don left with a six-inch scar crossing the left side of his forehead and the eye below forced into a permanent squint. Bloody and defeated, George let Don have the left-hand grill and he had to make do with the second-choice right-hand which wafted pungent piss after nightfall. Bloody druggies. Don would’ve won the grill bust-up in his glory days; twenty years for the right bullet in the wrong cop and he was never the same again. His complete inability to be serious meant neither George or anyone else would ever know what happened Saskatchewan Federal Penitentiary but only that his skull was never quite whole again. At least it made him happy. Or clueless.

“Fancy some fun?”

“Go for it.”

“Oi! OI!” Don yelled at the Evangelicals, proselytizing tourists in murder of crows formation.

“Hey Don, how you doing , bud?”

Don knew all the Toronto Evies and all the Toronto Evies knew him. He was a pain in the arse, but a conversation with him earned you treasures in Heaven.

“I gotta question.”

“Shoot.”

“Was Mary sexy?”

The Evangelical had endured too many of these encounters to show even a flicker of surprise, or indeed disgust, at Don’s questions. George was curious to see how this would get answered, before Don continued.

“I mean, we was told in Catholic school that Mary was a virgin, so does that mean God didn’t want to shag her coz she was ugly, so left her as a virgin and just did God-stuff to make a baby?”

All the theological and evangelism training in the world couldn’t possibly answer a question like that. Fair play to the Evangelicals, they tried, but their answers mainly consisted of ‘ums’ and ‘ers.’ Was Mary sexy? Did the prison doctors leave something foreign in his brain when they sewed his head up? He could’ve been a professor if he hadn’t been a criminal offender, mused George, uncomfortably aware of the Christian solider marching onward with his gaze right at him. Christ almighty, bloody God-botherers.

As the head Evie whipped out a Gospel tract and tried to explain it to Don, raising his voice each time Don interrupted with another intimidating and stupid question, (“Does God have a dick?”), the newest recruit, defined by facial features smooth with optimism and naivety, spoke to George.

“I’m Tim” he said, offering his hand. George raised his eyebrow at it as Tim took it back.

“George.” He found that being monosyllabic was the best way to get rid of Christians.

“It’s cold, eh?”

Of course it’s fucking cold. It’s late October in Canada. Moron. George didn’t dignify Tim’s question with a response.

“How long you been here?”

“Few months.”

“Where were you before?”

“Church Street.”

“Why did you move?”

“I got moved.”

Lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply, George deliberately blew the smoke into Tim’s face in an act of defiance. Church Street had been a dump of a hangout, full of heroin-addicted hookers getting too close for comfort.

“How long you been on the streets?”

“Five years.”

“What brought you here?”

“I’m a vet.”

“Which war?”

“Afghanistan.”

“How many tours.”

“Three.”

“Oh gee.”

Oh gee? How quaint and innocent. Try oh hell or oh fuck or oh my God or oh kill me now. Now he had a question.

“How old are you?”

“I’m 21, Sir?”

“Got a girlfriend?”

Tim blushed profusely, betraying his evangelically-imposed virginity.

“The Lord has been dropping some hints about his provision.” Even Tim couldn’t help but think theological bullshit in unison with George.

“You’re the same age as – “

But Tim would never find out who he was the same age as thanks to his senior announcing it was time to go after Don had just got his hands on the tits of the lone female of the group.

“Oh c’mon baby!” Don yelled after her, “I’m just telling you you’re sexier than Mary!”

George didn’t even try to supress a laugh, if you could even call it that. Joy felt foreign to his muscles, a grin for him was just a slightly weakened grimace. Pulling his worn coat tighter around him, he went back to scanning the sidewalk for spare change. A tribe of Ryerson students poured out from a lecture theatre; a gaggle of high school kids came springing passed into the gelato store; businessmen and women did the commuters’ strut as they headed for the subway. Always the same. Enough money for laptops and beers; bus fares and ice cream; designer briefcases and a house in the suburbs. But never a loonie to spare.

Occasionally, some person or people would break the monotony of human ambivalence. 

“Spare a loonie?”

The girl looked crestfallen.

 “I haven’t got any change sorry, but I can give you a cigarette. It’s menthol, is that ok?”

It wasn’t, George loathed menthol cigarettes, but the alien accent of the British tourist and the surprise of a response meant he accepted. The two other girls in the group looked at their cigarette-offering friend. One had folded arms and a frowning face.

“Okay?” she said loudly and aggressively at Cigarette Girl, “You have the map. Which way are we going?”

Rolling her eyes, Cigarette Girl perused the map with Angry Girl. The third girl looked at Don who was napping on his side of the grill. Her gaze followed on to George. What a smile, George thought to himself, she smiles like my…

“Okay, it’s this way.”

Angry Girl moved the group on.  Barely a few steps had passed before she not so quietly announced, “I can’t bare it whenever you make us stop at homeless people, they really smell and it makes me feel ill” adding as an afterthought, “I know they can’t help it.”

Hell no, Cigarette Girl thought to herself. She’d reached the end of her tether and launched into a moral tirade about the homeless. Smiling Girl dropped her pace so she could fall behind her bickering friends. I’ve flown half way across the world and it’s exactly the same. The same people of the same streets for the same reasons. It occurred to her the hypocrisy of being the quintessential arts student, reading and writing and bullshitting on the issues of humanity and divorcing it from the real world full of real people with real problems. But then, is sleeping on a ventilation grill in the centre of Toronto anymore ordinary than watching ‘Jeremy Kyle’ interspersed with eschatology tutorials?

“So, yes, they make fucking smell of BO but your fucking attitude stinks.”

Things were frosty in their hostel room that night.

“Is Mary sexy?”

“Dunno. But that Evie sure was.”

The men shivered in unison, winter was coming and not even the warm air of the ventilation grills could protect them from that cold, a cold so strong every breath is like snorting a razor blade. They’d have to find somewhere new. Would they stay together? Probably not. There’s no Oxford Dictionary definition for camaraderie on the streets.

“Three tours, eh?”

“I thought you were too busy ogling Christians?”

“Nah. They were too saggy to be that engrossing.”

“You’re a dirty bastard.”

“I’m an old man trying to stay warm and young women help that. Any women help that.”

“You should try Holly, the Church Street hooker.”

“Been there, done that. Shoddy heroin she pushes, I had the shits for a week.”  

An unexpected blast of cold air from underneath surprised George and he let out a small yelp. Ignoring his companion and stretching into a yawn, Don curled up into his foetal sleep position.

“Night night, there’s no bed so no bugs that’ll bite!”

He gave a phlegmy chuckle. Every night the same joke. Every night it wasn’t funny.

Three tours, each one worse than the next. He missed Erica terribly on the first one, using his scheduled night watch duty at the time to furiously think of her so as to release the longing. Nothing kills love like killing. Returning from sub-zero nights in the desert to a feather-filled double duvet with your childhood sweetheart isn’t that warming when you’ve shot a man at close range. He didn’t recognise his twins following his second return. Somehow his daughter was no longer his but girlfriend to a spotty lab-partner who wooed her over rat dissections and gifts bought with staff discount at Walmart. The bed was even colder. Sex didn’t bring either out in the slightest sweat; detached fingers with bloody wedding rings strewn across battle fields don’t scream eroticism.

This isn’t a cold bed.

George only signed up for a third tour because he knew Erica was banging the chartered accountant at Number 23. By the time he returned he’d expelled all his hate through a machine gun into the Middle Eastern dust. For his final return, he was empty. He went through the motions, in and out, no kissing no cuddling no loving just living, all the while feeling dead inside, deader than the men he stepped over to keep on fighting.

This isn’t a cold bed.

Hate keeps you warm in war, ambivalence is frostbite for the soul. George had slept on many a Canadian street in a variety of make-shift beds.

This isn’t a cold bed.